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Authored by: Nivag on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 02:23 AM EDT |
Where do we put dirty stuff that is off-topic?
I can't put everything dirty into my washing machine![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Off Topic Thread - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 03:19 AM EDT
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 07:24 AM EDT |
Word has leaked out that the London-based firm
ICAP, the
world's
largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being
investigated by American
authorities for behavior that
sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor
mess.
Regulators are
looking into whether or not a small group of brokers
at ICAP
may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks
to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the
world to calculate the
prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big
cities, major
corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt,
and
the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive.
It's about a $379
trillion market, meaning that any
manipulation would affect a pile of assets
about 100 times
the size of the United States federal budget.
It should
surprise no one that among the players implicated
in this scheme to fix the
prices of interest-rate swaps are
the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS,
Bank of
America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland –
that serve on
the Libor panel that sets global interest
rates. In fact, in recent years many
of these banks have
already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for
anti-
competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition
to Libor,
some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme,
detailed in Rolling Stone
last year, to rig municipal-debt
service auctions).
Though the jumble of
financial acronyms
sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there
may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and
ISDAfix suggests a
single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of
collusion and price-fixing hovering
under the ostensibly
competitive veneer of Wall Street
culture.
Rolling
Stone [mobile][ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 07:46 AM EDT |
Samsung Apple (both BBC) I like
this bit: Samsung displaced Apple as the world's biggest smartphone
maker last year. Now Samsung, like all large corporations, exist
primarily to make money, so don't be disappointed if they do some things that
you don't like, but as of now they are nice people as far as the FOSS community
is concerned, whereas Apple have even more of the walled garden approach than
M$ ever did. People are sick of closed, proprietary stuff, and/or companies
that behave like bullies.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 11:54 AM EDT |
Makes me wonder where the former CEO that started this is
now?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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